Sometimes it feels impossible to remember everything thrown at you during college.

1. Before You Beginguided Reading 101 Reading
2. Before You Beginguided Reading 101 Questions
3. Before You Beginguided Reading 101 Lesson
4. Before You Beginguided Reading 101 Dalmatians

Between the major battles of the Crimean War, partial derivatives, and the life cycle of the western gymnosperm, how do you keep it all in your head?

But it turns out that with the right tools, you can drastically improve your ability to learn and retain the mountains of information necessary to succeed both in college and beyond.

So read on and I’ll teach you 27 awesome memory hacks that will help you achieve this!

If you engage actively in the classroom, you'll learn how to read those challenging texts with ease, and by the time the semester ends, you'll be equipped with the tools to explain yourself not just in other classes but in the real world, too. Before the start of class, it can be helpful to understand what an English 101 college class is not. Norman Wright is a well-respected Christian counselor who has helped thousands of people improve their relationships and deal with grief, tragedy, and other concerns. He helps couples bring vibrancy to their relationships through counseling, seminars, and more than 90 books, including Before You Say “I Do” and After You Say “I Do.” Norm also reveals insights for spiritual growth. When you sight read, there are things you should examine in the music before you begin to play. Look for changes in tempo, key, or meter, and mark them with a pencil. If there are any densely packed measures, use your pencil to mark downbeats (perhaps quarter-notes or at least half-notes) so that you stay on the beat when playing them. College Board's 101 Books for the College-Bound Reader show list info This book list, compiled by the College Board, includes classics, contemporary fiction, short stories/essays, plays, and poems your student should read before (or during) college.

1. Your Brain 101

The human brain is an efficient organ, and sometimes we don’t keep information that we later wish we had. Our minds are full of memories and information accumulated over a lifetime, and we have basically two types of memory to help organize all this stuff:

1. a) Short-term memory = things we’re doing right now; very sharp!
2. b) Long-term memory = things we’ve done in the past; much duller.

The goal here is to better encode information into your long-term memory so that it’ll be available later for, say, a pop quiz or test. I’ll talk about specific techniques to help you do this coming up.

2. Set the Scene

Start off with choosing a study spot where your focus can rest fully on the task at hand to help with the encoding of memory. Even if you think you’re a multi-tasking ninja, your conscious mind can only focus on one thing at a time. So eliminate any distractions.

A quiet room with good lighting is best for reading. In a classroom, the ideal scenario is taking notes with pen and paper. Or if you’re a laptop note taker, at least shut off any notifications from popping up to remind you that you’ve gone fifteen minutes without checking Facebook!

Look:

Before You Beginguided Reading 101 Reading

Failing to prepare yourself to learn will render most of the following tricks and tips useless. We know life isn’t perfect, and you can’t always have the ideal setting available for studying. But with a little advance planning, it’s absolutely doable.

3. Be Present

If you can restate what you’ve heard in a lecture in your own words, your chances of remembering later are much higher than if you listen passively. This is called “attending,” and there are many ways to do it: writing notes during a lecture instead of just listening, or in a one-on-one session with your prof saying “This is what I think you said…” and then putting it in your own words. Just be sure that your laptop and other distractions are put away to enable you to focus solely on the task at hand.

4. Keep Calm and Study On

Stress decreases your ability to encode and retrieve memories. My guess is that if you’re reading this article, then that’s the last thing you want to do! This stress impact can be reduced with meditation, focused breathing, or even yoga. Anything you do to relax and reduce stress can and likely will help your memory.

5. Go to Bed

Yes, your mom was right. Those all-nighters are doing you more harm than good. While you may think the extra hours of studying will get you the grade you want, studies have proven that sleep is vital for memory. One such study completed by Rasch and Born demonstrated the importance of REM sleep—the deepest stage in the sleep cycle—in stabilizing memories. Getting enough sleep every night and maintaining as regular a sleep and wake time as possible will go miles toward a better memory.

6. Exercise

A good workout won’t just help your memory, but it may reduce stress and help you sleep. Triple whammy! This doesn’t mean you need to spend an hour on the treadmill every day. Simply electing to take the stairs instead of the elevator or walking the three blocks to your favorite coffee shop instead of taking the bus can make a difference.

7. Outsource Your Brain

Know a great way to help your memory? Stop relying on your brain to remember every little detail. In the age of calendar apps, let your phone remember that dentist appointment. You focus on the power rule for your calculus exam.

8. Focus on the Learning Process

Let’s face it: Nothing can replace the time you put in effectively studying and learning new material. Studying early and often will always beat last-minute cramming.

But inevitably with all the things competing for your time in college, you’ll find yourself the night before a test wondering how you’re ever going to get all that information in your head. That’s why I’m going to focus the rest of the tips on some specific techniques that can be real life savers for speeding up the memorization process.

9. Acronyms

You’ve likely heard of PEMDAS, the acronym that helped us all to memorize the order of operations in elementary school. By remembering this made-up word, you can recall the sequence of words that align with each letter: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, and Subtraction. Try making up your own acronyms as easy shortcuts to memorizing everything from historical events to chemical processes.

10. Acrostics

Similarly, acrostics are words comprised of the first letters of other words. But typically you use them to join longer phrases or concepts. For a simple example, if you’re studying the Gettysburg Address, you might make an acrostic that looks like this:

Abraham Lincoln delivered it on November 19, 1863

Because he wanted to honor Union soldiers who had fallen at the Battle of Gettsyburg

Equality, freedom, and democracy were its main themes

11. Create Connections and Associations

Connecting something you know to a new concept you’re trying to learn can help fix that new concept in your memory. For example, knowing that gravity causes things to move faster and faster toward the Earth when dropped, you may associate acceleration with gravity. Acceleration is like gravity but can be in any direction.

12. Repetition (Listening)

We all memorize through repetition when we listen to our favorite song a hundred times and suddenly realize we know every word. In the same way, when you listen to a definition you’re trying to memorize as either you or a friend repeat it over and over, then you’ll remember it more quickly.

13. Repetition (Doing)

This method is common with musicians and athletes. Perhaps a violinist can’t seem to memorize a few measures of music; she might repeat the same notes until her fingers seem to play the notes on their own.

14. Repetition (Reading)

If you want to remember the order of a story for a presentation, it may help to read its summary several times. When you reach the point of knowing what’s about to happen before you read it, then you know you’ve memorized the order of events.

15. Repetition (Writing)

When it comes to things like new terms and spelling differences, sometimes writing and re-writing something until it becomes second nature can help you to memorize it.

16. Rhyme-Keys

This method typically is used with a list in which order is important. You first link each number to a word that rhymes with it. For example, number one could be “sun”, and two could be “blue”. To keep two things in order, you might tell a story with these rhyme-keys. If butter is first and cheese is second, then you could tell the following little story to remember: “The butter melts in the sun with the blue cheese.”

17. Visualize

Engage as many senses as you can. Maybe you want to remember a battle for your European history class. Close your eyes and think about the sequence of events. What happened first? Imagine it. Imagine the sound the boats made as they raced toward the shore. What happened second? Imagine the sound of the cannons as they were fired. What happened third? Smell the smoke of a fire. Engage as many of your senses as you can. When you recall that first event, go through the same process until you’ve memorized it.

18. Story Lines

Engage the narrative part of your brain. Create a story or dramatize one you already know. Maybe you need to remember a chemical reaction. Give the carbon and hydrogen a story! For example, tell the story of their breakup and new relationships. By making these mundane things into characters, you give yourself new things to remember about them—and maybe have a little fun doing it too. This method has saved students when they had to remember dozens of physics formulas!

19. Chunking

Our working, or short-term, memories can only retain five to nine pieces of information at a time. To make the best use of this memory limitation, we can remember the same number of chunks of information instead. For example, as opposed to thinking of each digit of a phone number individually, we tend to think of them in groups. This turns a 10-digit number into three chunks, helping us to memorize it. This idea would help us remember eight numbers by thinking of them as two years. For example, 18421963 becomes 1842 and 1963 as opposed to 1-8-4-2-1-9-6-3. See how that works? Chunking is effective for short-term memorization.

20. Scent

Yes, you read that right. Studies such as one conducted by Anne-Lise Saive, Jean-Pierre Royet, and Jane Plailly have shown that smells can evoke memories. These memories are typically more likely to be sensations or situations rather than specific facts (episodic memory). So, if you were to always chew mint gum in your biology class, while it may not help you directly to remember the chemical formula for glucose, it will evoke the memory of being in that classroom, which may in turn help you recall that formula.

21. Method of Loci

This method is also known as the “mind palace.” Imagine you’re walking through your very own castle. You greet George Washington as you step into the foyer, and you greet Barack Obama as you step out of the back door after meeting each of the presidents in various locations in between. You remember the order of the rooms you walked through, and by mentally placing the presidents in those rooms by chronological order, you’ll visualize your way into an A on that presidential history quiz.

22. Image-Name Associations

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That girl who lives down the hall—maybe it’s Bess? You know you won’t remember her name alone, but you notice she has hair so long you wonder how she buttons her jeans. You now think of her as “Bess whose hair’s a mess,” and now you’ve associated a defining feature with her name, which will help you remember it. This could work in other situations as well, say, for a historical figure or world leaders on a political science test.

23. Chaining

Before You Beginguided Reading 101 Lesson

When you have a series or “chain” of things to memorize, you can utilize your visual memory despite having verbal ideas to remember. To do this, you can make up a story as silly or as realistic as you want to chain the unrelated ideas together. For example, three monkeys made a point of going in one roller coaster cart for four different rides. One of these rides was so busy they had five monkeys in one cart. This silly story helps you remember that the first several digits of pi are 3.1415 by chaining the numbers together.

24. Time It Right

If you study before bed, your brain is better able to process that complicated information during sleep. Just know that this relies on you actually getting enough sleep to allow your brain to do its work.

25. Attach Emotion

We often remember embarrassing or negative emotions more so than positive ones. So we remember those things we first got wrong in a study group more than the things we could teach others. If you make a mistake in a math technique, the frustration may cause you to remember that you must make the other choice next time. This won’t work for things like city names, but it will work if you know it’s an A or B situation.

26. Organize

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If you organize a list of names you must remember in alphabetical order, you’ll more easily notice that you skipped a name if you’ve jumped from A names to C names without the name starting with B you wrote the night before.

27. Get Moving

Walking or other gentle exercise allows us to occupy the part of our brain that is idle during resting study. Because we can walk without conscious thought, we let our conscious mind focus more fully on the issue at hand.

At the end of the day, no memorization technique can replace strong study habits. However, if you need a memory boost before that final exam or peer review, these tools should do the trick!

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